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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I came across this guide (dated 2025) a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. Not a quant or even in finance though, so I don’t know how accurate it is:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/da7zfjj2rplwzf2sfiriz/Buy-Sid...

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Gappy is one of the more decorated, public figures in the space. That PDF gives a candid overview of what it's like to interview/work in the industry.

Gappy is very good but occupies a slightly odd role in that he's sort of a jobbing philosopher for hedge funds at this point

The exception rather than the norm, yeah but IMO his takes are refreshing/insightful.

What's a convenient and safe way to open PDFs safely?

Some options seem to be: Upload to google drive (inconvenient), use some open-source tool (LLM suggests DangerZone), use a VM (very inconvenient)

I use markitdown[0] religiously. You’ll lose fidelity for anything complex (math equations, images), but it does a great job 95% of the time in my experience.

I’m assuming the attack surface is reduced. I invoke it through a docker container. But this might be a misplaced sense of safety.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

A one-way link (data diode) transmits it to a box with simplified hardware (eg RISC architecture). The box has a dedicated monitor and keyboard. Once you're finished, you sell the box on Craiglist. Then, buy a new, sealed replacement from Best Buy.

Pay per view was an expensive, business model for cable. For PDF's, it's even more expensive.

Note: It's more convenient than full, per-app, physical security.

Open it with Firefox. The Firefox PDF renderer is implemented in Javascript and sandbox-restricted like any unknown web site.

Dropbox is rendering that pdf as html, so using that link should be safer than downloading the pdf.

Sumatra PDF if you are on Windows.

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